In certain situations, it is desirable to be able to determine the geographic location at which arbitrary image data, such as still images or video, was captured. That location can in some cases be determined from a description that is presented along with the image data or from metadata that is embedded in the image data. When such information is not provided, image matching algorithms can sometimes be used to determine the location at which the image data was captured. Specifically, the scenes within the image data can be compared to scenes within images of one or more databases. If the scene or a part of the scene in the image data matches a scene or part of a scene of an image of known origin stored within the database, it can be assumed that the image data was captured at the same location as was the database image. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of a technique is limited by the content of the database. Although it may be relatively easy to identify a location when it is a location that is frequently photographed, such as tourist destinations, it may be more difficult to find matches for image data that was captured at other locations.
From the above discussion, it can be appreciated that it would be desirable to be able to estimate the geographic location at which image data was captured without having to rely on conventional image matching.